The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Ordering, installing and configuring digital voice or voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service for a business or other organization has been a complex process. Typically the organization first orders or obtains digital voice processing equipment, such as an IP private branch exchange (IP-PBX), directly from a vendor of the equipment or through a value-added reseller (VAR) or other agent. The organization also orders one or more digital voice circuits either directly from a VoIP service provider or indirectly through the VAR. Presently extensive competition exists in the market for digital voice service, but only certain service providers offer IP voice service. Therefore, personnel in the organization are required to research various network service providers, determine which ones offer IP service in the organization's geographical area, select a service provider, undergo a credit check for the organization, execute a contract, and coordinate installation of circuits and equipment. Thus, many steps are involved.
In some cases, customers who order phone lines from traditional national telephone service providers (“incumbent” service providers) or from competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs or “challengers”) do not receive the phone lines and provisioned dial plan for their phone lines for several days or weeks. Delays may arise as a result of the customer needing to coordinate installation of circuits and equipment with the service provider, a local vendor, or other parties, etc.
Further, even after a service provider installs and tests circuits at the customer's site, the customer remains responsible to connect the customer premises equipment and configure that equipment to work with the circuits. Extensive, error-prone manual configuration steps are often involved in configuring IP-PBX devices for different service providers. For example, the customer or the customer's VAR might receive a username and password for the IP-PBX to log into the service provider's servers, telephone numbers, and other information from the service provider in an electronic mail (e-mail) message or in writing in a contract. The VAR or the customer is then required to manually enter parameter values from the e-mail message into a configuration file or configuration interface of the IP-PBX, or use the parameter values in command-line interface commands for the IP-PBX. As telephony interconnects move to IP using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for VoIP, service providers and customers desire to reduce the time needed to provision IP/SIP Trunks.